Arduino use is exploding, thanks to its huge community

One of the best decisions we made was basing our autopilot system on Arduino (credit goes to Jordi for spotting its potential so early and selling me on it). The engineers all sniffed at it, complaining that it was just an 8-bit processor running at 16Mhz and could never compete with 32-bit ARM processors running at 70Mhz and faster. But what Jordi spotted was something more: the Atmel chips are RISC processors and very effecient, an autopilot is not actually a very computationally intensive task, and most importantly, it's not about "feeds and speeds", it's about community, which Arduino attracts by being cheap, open and very easy to use.

Arduino has won the community competition hands down. The chart above is from the latest status post, and it shows more than 750,000 monthly vistors to the website and nearly 5 million monthly page views. These figures continue to grow at 100% per year.

Community brings tens of thousands of smart people around a platform, and many hands make light work. The amount of code and libraries out there that can be used for free are staggering and there's little need to reinvent the wheel. What basing the ArduPilot line on Arduino has meant is that we're not just using a great technology platform; we're part of a movement. That means not just great tools and thousands of available developers, but also a "cool factor", that really helps with marketing and adoption. In short, the success of the Arduino revolution is thrilling to watch, not least because it means we've hitched our wagon to the right horse!

bcr: yes, that was exactly what we heard from engineers three years ago. We ignored them and are glad we did. Autopilot teams that decided to go with "superior hardware"--ARM, Propeller, Gumstix, PIC32 and the like--had to deal with complex toolchains and relatively small pools of qualified developers, which raised the barrier to entry. Many succeeded anyway due to a few brilliant people at the core (Paparazzi and the UAV DevBoard, for example), but still tend to have smaller dev teams. Others have stalled out completely.

Note that you can use Arduino without having to use their simple IDE. The APM dev team mostly uses Eclipse and other pro-quality dev tools, and most of the code is C++, not C. But it's all still Arduino-compatible, so even newcomers can work with it in the basic Arduino framework.

That said, Arduino is now extending to ARM and we are, too, thanks to the work of Roberto Navoni and others. But because we started with an easy-to-use computing platform that was more capable that it looked at first glance, we feel we were able to get critical mass easier and sooner, which will help us navigate the more complex migration to 32 bits and RTOSs with a lot of momentum achieved already.

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bcr April 5, 2011 at 7:24pm

Fair enough and well said. I do think the move to ARM will have many advantages.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson April 5, 2011 at 7:14pm

bcr: yes, that was exactly what we heard from engineers three years ago. We ignored them and are glad we did. Autopilot teams that decided to go with "superior hardware"--ARM, Propeller, Gumstix, PIC32 and the like--had to deal with complex toolchains and relatively small pools of qualified developers, which raised the barrier to entry. Many succeeded anyway due to a few brilliant people at the core (Paparazzi and the UAV DevBoard, for example), but still tend to have smaller dev teams. Others have stalled out completely.

Note that you can use Arduino without having to use their simple IDE. The APM dev team mostly uses Eclipse and other pro-quality dev tools, and most of the code is C++, not C. But it's all still Arduino-compatible, so even newcomers can work with it in the basic Arduino framework.

That said, Arduino is now extending to ARM and we are, too, thanks to the work of Roberto Navoni and others. But because we started with an easy-to-use computing platform that was more capable that it looked at first glance, we feel we were able to get critical mass easier and sooner, which will help us navigate the more complex migration to 32 bits and RTOSs with a lot of momentum achieved already.
bcr April 5, 2011 at 6:56pm

Popularity alone doesn't make something good. Once you're past the learning curve, the ARM MCUs are far superior to AVR8.

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